Posted
by
msmash
on Thursday November 10, 2016 @03:25PM
from the shopathon dept.

Alibaba Group posted $1 billion (6.81 billion yuan) of sales within the first five minutes of its Singles' Day sales, a 24-hour event that may offer clues on the health of the Chinese economy and its largest online retailer. From a report on Bloomberg:Investors are keeping a close eye on the annual Nov. 11 spending blitz that dwarfs Black Friday and Cyber Monday in the U.S., to see if Alibaba can reprise the 60 percent leap in transactions to 91.2 billion yuan it managed last year. The e-commerce giant again turned up the star-wattage for 2016, enlisting Hollywood actress Scarlett Johansson, sports celebrity David Beckham, basketball legend Kobe Bryant and pop-rock band One Republic to headline a pre-sale gala and drum up international attention. Pioneered by Alibaba in 2009 and since replicated by rivals including JD.com Inc., Singles' Day has become somewhat of a barometer of Chinese consumer sentiment.

Do they sell grammar books? Then you could learn about uncountable nouns.

I do not believe that Lego blocks would be considered as an uncountable noun in this context since you usually buy them in a set with a known quantity. For instance, when you buy a Star Wars X-wing Fighter Lego Set your buying a set with exactly 560 pieces.

Does this Amazon like company matter to those in the west? Just want to know. How much of this billion dollars was because of activity from the west?

How many of people in the west even know about Alibaba?

Well, very little in the west, but it's quite important as everything is on there. A lot of suppliers are, so if you're needing some random item from China, chances are you can order it online via Alibaba.

If you need a source of cheap cables, Alibaba would be where you wanted to go to get dozens of oddball

AliExpress is pretty decent if you don't mind waiting for your order, sometimes in the vicinity of 20-49 days. Rush shipping to ~1week (via DHL) cost me ~$12 for my Xiaomi phone. Unfortunately their payment processor is Russian and you can't use it in the States -- although I heard rumblings a while back now that PayPal had cut some kind of deal with AliBaba, I haven't seen anything come of it yet.

The sale is rolling by timezone. As I type this in, the sale will be starting in about 9 hours 15 minutes from where I live.

So, that was all China.

Aliexpress is getting bigger in the US. It is the same factory sources as many US companies, so the build quality is very similar and the prices are often significantly less. They also reflect the chinese tech market and that can be several years ahead of the US domestic sales market.

Thats the whole point! They are BIGGER than west counterparts and still growing fast.Its a pretty big signal for Chinese, they can care less and less about west. Their well being is no longer linked to the amount of crap west imports from Asia.

Scarlett Johansson co-starred in the 2003 Bill Murray movie 'Lost In Translation', about a fading American movie star in Tokyo doing an advertising gig for a liquor company. Now she's in China doing an advertising gig for Alibaba. The last time I checked she was hardly 'fading' though...

Singles' Day was invented by college students in the 1990s as a counter to Valentine's Day according to the Communist Party-owned People's Daily. Written numerically, Nov. 11 is reminiscent of "bare branches," a local expression for bachelors and spinsters.